A Letter to the Politbureau Members with a Draft Decision for the C.C., R.C.P.(B.) and the Council of Labour and Defence onThe Question of Rutgers’ Proposals

Written:Written between October 12 and 15, 1921Published:First published in 1959 inLenin Miscellany XXXVI.

      Printed from the manuscript.Source:Lenin
	  Collected Works,

      1st English Edition,

      Progress Publishers,1965,

      Moscow,Volume 42,

      page350a.Translated:Yuri SdobnikovTranscription\Markup:D. WaltersPublic Domain:Lenin Internet Archive

      (2003).You may freely copy, distribute,
	display and perform this work; as well as make derivative and
	commercial works. Please credit “Marxists Internet
	Archive” as your source.•README

Inmy opinion, Rutgers’ proposals cannot be accepted now in
their present form. But I should like to try a thing like this: to make himmodify the group(Rutgers + Heywood + Calvert). And modify the
financial terms, too. We could decide this way:

whilerejecting the proposals of Comrade Rutgers in
their present form, i.e., the motion of Comrade Bogdanov and the members of
the S.E.C. Presidium who voted with him,

theC.C. (and then theC.L.D.in
administrative order) expresses an earnest wish that Comrade Rutgers’ group
should not regard this refusal as a final one and should revise their
proposals on the following lines:

α) modification of the group, the main group of sponsors, by adding
to it 5-8 prominent representatives of the American labour union movement
or other labour organisations;

β) reducing our Government’s expenses to the sum of $300,000 maximum;’) cutting and specifying our expenses in the event of the agreement being

cancelled.[1]

[1]Lenin’sproposals formed the basis of the Politbureau’s decision of
October 15, 1921, concerning the proposals of S. Rutgers, and the Council
of Labour and Defence decision of October 17, 1921, “On the Terms of an
Agreement with the Rutgers Group”.